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Comment by aceofspades19 | Hacker News Reader

Whats wrong with SVG? Doesn't it accomplish what the OP wants to do already and is already a standard supported by a lot of applications? I must be missing something here

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XML is a really bad format for containing large chunks of binary data (bitmap)

And why are we storing binary data? The whole point of SVG is everything is in XML unless I'm very mistaken

How else would you propose to store a bitmap.

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heh

The author is looking for a container format capable of storing multiple image layers, and one that is capable of storing both vector and raster images.

So you could possibly argue that XML (a la SVG) is the right format to represent the vector files within that container, but it wouldn't be appropriate for the container file itself since binary data really bloats XML.

The XML can store references to the binary chunks in standard formats though, alongside the vector shapes and filters.

  <svg viewBox="## ## ## ##">
    <image xlink:href="layer1.png" x="##" y="##" width="##" height="##"/>
    <image xlink:href="layer2.jpg" x="##" y="##" width="##" height="##"/>
    <rect x="##" y="##" width="##" height="##" fill="red"/>
  </svg>

All that's left is to standardize a way to package it.

Thats actually a good, along with the fake .zip extension.

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